The ten bravest ads of all time

marketing director, Carlo Gighlieno, on his way to work. The strikers
set up pickets to prevent anyone entering.

Hudson negotiated with the pickets, and after a week, he and his crew
were allowed in to the factory. The unions reckoned that with no workers
and no actors, the ad could not be made. But Hudson wanted to film
robots, not people, so the absence of workers suited his purposes
perfectly.

Once the strikers got wind of what was happening they were furious. They
tried to break into the factory and sealed exits with burning barricades
to prevent the crew from leaving. However, Hudson and his crew were
smuggled out of a side entrance.

Advertising is a cerebral endeavour that rarely calls for such physical
courage. Nonetheless, there's a widespread feeling that there isn't much
bravery of any kind in adland these days. Sometimes it seems as if the
industry has gone all "health and safety", with clients clustering to
the middle ground of their markets, while agencies feed them creative
work that takes no risks, but rarely falls flat on its face either.

Perhaps that's why so much advertising is so uncreative at the moment,
Sir Frank Lowe, the founding partner at The Red Brick Road, suggests. He
says the question of bravery isn't simply one of pride or machismo, it
is indivisible from the well-being and standing of the whole industry.
"We are not in a rich period creatively speaking. Fear has permeated our
industry. Agencies have two aims these days; to hit their profit margins
and to give clients whatever they think they want. I'm not sure that
these attitudes go hand in hand with creativity."

He is entitled to the role of brave advertising knight because, as the
managing director of Collett Dickenson Pearce in the 70s and of Lowe
during the 80s and 90s, he was involved with many of the bravest, most
entertaining and most creative campaigns in British advertising
history.

True, it was a time when agencies were strong and clients were
relatively weak. Today, however, clients have the whip hand, they have
greater commercial power and they tend to know more about advertising
than they did. So how do you persuade them to buy riskier or braver
work?

If you think it's about persuasion or selling, you've missed a
fundamental point, Martin Jones of the AAR says. The idea of the
handsome account director standing up and persuading the client to do
something he doesn't really want to do through sheer force of
personality is just fanciful.

He nominates another Hudson spot, Saatchi & Saatchi's 1989 British
Airways "face", as one of the bravest ads of all time, "for its
logistical bravery. With all those people, it could have gone hideously
wrong. But brave advertising doesn't happen because of the presenting
skills of one person. It happens because the client trusts you. And
trust can only be earned as the result of a good relationship."

The Cadbury "gorilla" ad illustrates the importance of relationships in
producing brave ads. Cadbury originally gave the brief for "advertising
that is as enjoyable as the product itself" to Publicis, which in
Cadbury's view, it failed to crack. The account was then handed to
Publicis' stablemate Fallon. "After 20 minutes they just wanted to get
on with it," the Cadbury marketing director, Phil Rumbol, recalls.

Fallon presented what it calls "more sensible ideas", but Rumbol chose
"gorilla". But that would have been inconceivable had the former InBev
marketer Rumbol not already worked with the Fallon chairman, Laurence
Green, on Stella Artois at Lowe.

As Sony's vice-president of marketing, the former Fallon client David
Patton, now the chief executive of Grey, oversaw the making of two
outstandingly original commercials, last year's Bravia "balls" ad and
the 1998 "double life" spot for PlayStation. He puts it even more
starkly. "Even though Bravia was a billion-pound launch, we bought the
'balls' idea on the strength of a one-line description and a mood reel.
But we knew we had the strategy right (colour) and we had complete
confidence in our creative agency."

So how do you develop that relationship? Paul Arden, the creative
director of Saatchi & Saatchi from 1980 to 1993, suggests passion and
time are the key factors. "If you are passionate enough, the client will
give you the benefit of the doubt. But it'll take a good two or three
years working together, and you have to pick the right client. It's no
use trying to get juniors to buy daring work. They don't have the
judgment and often they are only empowered to say 'no'."

Perhaps the fact that senior clients only stay in their jobs for an
average of 18 months these days is a serious obstacle to building trust.
But trust starts being built before the client and agency team have even
met. For an industry that lives off its advice on brands, but rarely
bothers to brand itself, it may come as a surprise to learn that the
role of the agency brand can be crucial in determining whether the
client will ever trust you enough to allow brave work.

"As a client you go to certain agencies for certain things," Anthony
Simmonds Gooding, the D&AD chairman who has been a senior client and
agency chairman, says. "I have noticed that clients will accept work
from one agency that they wouldn't consider from another. I'm certain,
for instance, that had Lintas proposed the current Lynx campaign when I
was chairman, they would have rejected it. But they bought it from
Bartle Bogle Hegarty."

Which brings us to the final truth about brave advertising. Bravery is
related to what you stand to lose, and agencies stand to lose a lot less
than clients. As Jones says: "Agencies need corporate courage. If a
campaign goes wrong, they might lose 15 per cent of their income.
Clients need personal courage. If it goes wrong, they can destroy the
business and lose their jobs."

HEINEKEN - 'Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach'

Lowe

Citation: Defied research

"In 1981, beer ads were either blokes enjoying a pint while gazing down
a busty barmaid's cleavage, or about provenance," Sir Frank Lowe
recalls. "But I thought refreshment was the main benefit, so I wrote
Terry Lovelock's line on the back of a sick bag while travelling to
Leningrad with the client. Millward Brown swore that it would never
work. But the client was amazingly trusting, he ignored the research and
backed our judgment." Sales subsequently rocketed from 100,000 to three
million barrels.

BENSON & HEDGES - 'Iguana'

Collett Dickenson Pearce

Citation: Deliberately meaningless

In the 70s, Benson & Hedges was seen largely as a "party" cigarette,
smoked to impress on special occasions. It needed to widen its appeal.
But new rules made it difficult for cigarette ads to say anything
coherent. So Collett Dickenson Pearce came up with this piece of
surrealist glamour to promote the brand. "I'll never forget first seeing
it in the cinema," Malcolm Duffy of Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy
recalls. "My God, it was sexy, the photography was stunning. It
established that viewers would and could work at unlocking meaning and
didn't have to have the message rammed down their throats."

DUNLOP - 'Tested for the unexpected'

Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO

Citation: Gratuitously arty

Most tyre marketing is aimed at the trade. In this case "the trade"
consists of poorly educated young men with crowbars. The idea that the
tyres might be tested for the unexpected, was perhaps not so
revolutionary. The idea that the creative execution should illustrate
the strategy, was. "Everything about it was unexpected: the idea that
tyre ads should be aimed above groin level; the choice of director in
Tony Kaye; the soundtrack; the bizarre imagery and perhaps most of all,
the acid-tinged post-production conspired to make this a totally
unexpected and, therefore, very brave commercial," Duffy says.

MARMITE - 'You either love it or hate it'

DDB London

Citation: Dissed the product

Until this campaign aired, there was a conceit in mass marketing that
anyone and everyone might buy your product. The truth is, of course,
that even the most popular products are bought by only a fraction of the
market. The dirty work of segmentation is usually left to media.
"Polarising attitudes has become common place on the internet these
days, but this was the first campaign to publicly acknowledge that some
people might not like the product. It built a strategy out of that
observation and spent millions telling people so. Super brave,
especially for a multinational such as Unilever," Laurence Green, the
chairman of Fallon, says.

ORANGE - 'The future's bright, the future's Orange'

WCRS

Citation: Breaking and entering the category

By 1994, the UK mobile phone market was nicely sewn up by three
operators, boasting about functional benefits and technology. Orange cut
through all that with a brand based on fruit and a promise: "The
future's bright, the future's Orange." The first ads were derided as
obscure and irrelevant, not least by the ad community. "This was a
category filled with ads featuring people carrying brick-like handsets
looking cool. Orange launched with a floating baby, chanting numbers and
not a handset in sight. If it had gone wrong, Orange would have lost
tens of millions of pounds," Debbie Klein, the chief executive of WCRS,
says.

ORANGE - 'Gold Spot'

Mother

Citation: Dissing the client

The idea of featuring the client is not exactly new. Baxter's Soups do
it, Remington did it, Tango did it twice. But few campaigns have the
bottle to present the client as a complete berk. And few clients are
brave enough to be shown that way. The campaign shows A-list stars
pitching ideas to the Orange Film Board, a group of hideous corporate
yes men whose philistinism destroys every idea put in front of them. But
by ridiculing themselves, the ads position Orange as a cool, socially
responsible, corporation, completely in tune with modern attitudes.

BLACKCURRANT TANGO - 'St George'

HHCL & Partners

Citation: Reckless xenophobia

Tango always broke the conventions of soft-drink advertising. But the
sight of the Tango "marketing director" big Ray Gardiner, standing on
the cliffs of Dover, clad in purple shorts, gut billowing in the breeze
as he screamed xenophobic abuse at a French exchange student who had the
temerity not to like blackcurrant, was arguably its finest moment. "It
was executionally brave. This was a tiny variant of a tiny product. It
was the most triumphantly brand-led product film you'll ever see," Green
says.

SONY PLAYSTATION - 'Double life'

TBWA\London

Citation: Exposing unspoken product truth

All of the information about the product and the brand is in the copy -
it's just presented in a more poetic way that doesn't need to shout.
TBWA's award shelf buckled under the weight of the gongs this campaign
won and, most importantly, sales rocketed. It broke the mould of gaming
advertising. It showed that it could work without the need for endless
action shots from the games themselves. Most importantly, it presented
an attitude that resonated with a different audience and by positioning
the brand as directly opposite to the Nintendos of this world made it
acceptable for me to buy the product. Genius. This campaign marked
Sony's first venture into the gaming world and billions of pounds in
future revenues were riding on its success. It broke with category
convention in not showing the product or the games. "Instead it told an
unspoken truth about gaming, which was generally considered a childish
waste of time. The advertising dared to say that there are deep and
noble things going on in gaming. It opened up a whole new affluent adult
audience for PlayStation," David Bain, the planning director of Beattie
McGuinness Bungay, says.

CADBURY'S DAIRY MILK - 'Gorilla'

Fallon

Citation: Bet the business on a gorilla

Cadbury's Dairy Milk is Cadbury's master brand. Sales had tanked, it had
recently given up its prestigious sponsorship of Coronation Street,
there had been a series of public relations blunders over the previous
year and the company was due to split its operations on the stock
market. It is no exaggeration to say that this campaign was crucial to
the future of the company. So what did Cadbury do? Put out an ad that
broke all confectionery conventions, it had no "yum moment", it didn't
mention the product and scarcely mentioned the company.

MERCEDES - 'Lucky Star'

Campbell Doyle Dye

Citation: The ad wasn't an ad

Lucky Star was designed to look like a trailer for a new Michael Mann
film, in which Benicio del Toro flees government agents. It had no logo,
no sign-off line and no endframe to indicate it was a ad or had anything
to do with Mercedes. It relied on PR to tell you that you had been
watching a car ad. "It was a branding campaign that didn't mention the
brand, disguised as a trailer for a film that didn't exist, in which the
car was the hero but looked like a piece of product placement," the
writer Walter Campbell says. "It was risky, but with our small budget,
not as risky as failing to stand out."